Chapter VIII

I sat on the terrace watching the sun go down into the sea and thinking about Foster, somewhere out there beyond the purple palaces on the far horizon, in the ship that had waited for him for three thousand years, heading home at last. It was strange to reflect that for him, travelling near the speed of light, only a few weeks had passed, while three years went by for me--three fast years that I had put to good use.

The toughest part had been the first few months, after I put the life boat down in a cañon in the desert country south of a little town called Itzenca, in Peru. I hiked to town, carrying a pack with a few carefully selected items to start my new career. It took me two weeks to work, lie, barter, and plead my way to the seaport town of Callao and another week to line up passage home as a deck hand on a banana scow. I disappeared over the side at Tampa, and made it to Miami without attracting attention. As far as I could tell, the cops had already lost interest in me.

The items I had brought with me from the life boat were a pocketful of little grey dominoes, that were actually movie film, and a small projector to go with them. I didn't offer them for sale, direct. I made arrangements with an old acquaintance in the business of making pictures with low costume budgets for private showings; I set up the apparatus and projected my films, and he copied them in 35 mm. I told him that I'd smuggled them in from East Germany.

I had twelve pictures altogether; with a little judicious cutting and a dubbed-in commentary, they made up into fast-moving twenty-minute short subjects. He got in touch with a friend in the distribution end in New York, and after a little cagey fencing over contract terms, we agreed on a deal that paid me a hundred thousand for the twelve, with an option on another dozen at the same price.

Within a week after the pictures hit the neighborhood theatres around Bayonne, New Jersey, in a cautious try-out, I had offers up to half a million for my next consignment, no questions asked. I left my pal Mickey to handle the details, on a percentage basis, and headed back for Itzenca.

* * * * *

The lifeboat was just as I'd left it; it would have been all right for another fifty years, as far as the danger of anybody stumbling over it was concerned. I explained to the crew I brought out with me that it was a fake rocket ship, a prop I was using for a film I was making. They went to work setting up a system of camouflage nets (part of the plot, I told them) and unloading my cargo.

A year after my homecoming, I had my island--a square mile of perfect climate, fifteen miles off the Peruvian coast--and a house that was tailored to my every whim. The uppermost floor--almost a tower--was a strong-room, and it was there that I had stored my stock in trade. I had sold the best of the hundred or so films I had picked out before leaving Foster, but there were plenty of other items. The projector itself was the big prize. The self-contained power unit converted nuclear energy to light with 99 percent efficiency. It scanned the 'films', one molecular layer at a time, and projected a continuous picture. The color and sound were absolutely lifelike.

The principles involved in the projector were new, and--in theory, at least--way over the heads of our local physicists. But the practical application was nothing much. I figured that, with the right contacts in scientific circles to help me introduce the system, I had a billion-dollar industry up my sleeve. I had already fed a few little gimmicks into the market; a tough paper, suitable for shirts and underwear; a chemical that bleached teeth white as the driven snow; an all-color pigment for artists. With the knowledge I had absorbed from all the briefing rods I had studied, I had the techniques of a hundred new industries at my fingertips--and I hadn't exhausted the possibilities yet.

I spent most of a year roaming the world, discovering all the things that a free hand with a dollar bill could do for a man. Then followed a year of fixing up the island.

* * * * *

Now, after the first big thrill of economic freedom had worn off, it was beginning to get me: boredom, the disease of the idle rich, that I had sworn would never touch me. But thinking about wealth and having it on your hands are two different things, and I was beginning to remember almost with nostalgia, the tough old times when every day was an adventure, full of cops and missed meals and a thousand unappeased desires.

I finished up my expensive cigar and leaned forward to drop it in a big silver ashtray, when something caught my eye out across the red-painted water. I sat squinting at it, then went inside and came out with a pair of 12x binoculars. I focussed them and studied the dark speck that stood out clearly now against the gaudy sky. It was a heavy looking power boat, heading dead toward my island.

I watched it come closer, and ease alongside the hundred foot concrete jetty I had built below the sea-wall. The engines died, and the boat sat, in a sudden silence. Two heavy deck guns were mounted on the foredeck, and there were four torpedoes slung in launching cradles. I saw ranks of helmeted men drawn up on deck. They shuffled off onto the pier, formed up into two squads. I counted; forty-eight men, and a couple of officers. There was the faint sound of orders being barked, and the column stepped off, moving along the paved road that led up to the house. They halted. The two officers, wearing class A's, and a tubby civilian with a briefcase approached the steps leading up to my perch.

* * * * *

The leading officer, a brigadier general, no less, looked up at me.

"I am General Smale," he said. "This is Colonel Sanchez of the Peruvian Army--" he indicated the other military type--"and Mr. Pruffy of the American Embassy at Lima."

I nodded.

"We would like to talk with you about an official matter, Mr. Legion. It's of great importance, involving the security of your country."

"OK, General," I said. "Come on up."

They filed onto the terrace, hesitated, then shook hands, and sat down in the empty chairs. Pruffy held his briefcase in his lap.

"I'm here," the general said, "to ask you a few questions, Mr. Legion. Mr. Pruffy represents the Department of State in the matter, and Colonel Sanchez--"

"Don't tell me," I said. "He represents the Peruvian government, which is why I don't ask you what the hell an armed American force is doing wandering around on Peruvian soil. What's it all about, Smale?"

"I'll come directly to the point," he said. "For some time, the investigative and security agencies of the US government have been building a file on what for lack of a better name has been called 'The Martians'. A little over three years ago an unidentified flying object appeared on a number of radar screens, descending from extreme altitude. It came to earth at ..." he hesitated.

"Don't tell me you came all the way out here to tell me you can't tell me," I said.

"--a site in England," Smale said. "American aircraft were dispatched to investigate the object. Before they could make identification, it rose again, accelerated at tremendous speed, and was lost at an altitude of several hundred miles."

"I thought we had better radar than that," I said. "The satellite program--"

"No such specialized equipment was available," Smale said. "An intensive investigation turned up the fact that two strangers--possibly Americans--had visited the site only a few hours before the--ah--visitation."

I nodded. I was thinking about the close call I'd had when I went back to see about putting a bomb down the shaft to obliterate the beacon station. There were plain-clothes men all over the place, like old maids at a movie star's funeral. It was just as well; they never found it. The rocket blasts had collapsed the tunnel, and apparently the whole underground installation was made of nonmetallic substances that didn't show up on detecting equipment. I had an idea metal was passé where Foster came from.

* * * * *

"Some months later," Smale went on, "a series of rather curious short films went on exhibition in the United States. They showed scenes representing conditions on other planets, as well as ancient and prehistoric incidents here on Earth. They were prefaced with explanations that they merely represented the opinions of science as to what was likely to be found on distant worlds. They attracted wide interest, and with few exceptions, scientists praised their verisimilitude."

"I admire a clever fake," I said. "With a topical subject like space travel--"

"One item which was commented on as a surprising inaccuracy, in view of the technical excellence of the other films," Smale said, "was the view of our planet from space, showing the Earth against a backdrop of stars. A study of the constellations by astronomers quickly indicated a 'date' of approximately 7000 B.C. for the scene. Oddly, the north polar cap was shown centered on Hudson's Bay. No South Polar cap was in evidence. The continent of Antarctica appeared to be at a latitude of some 30°, entirely free of ice."

I looked at him and waited.

"How, studies made since that time indicate that nine thousand years ago, the North Pole was indeed centered on Hudson's Bay," Smale said. "And Antarctica was in fact ice-free."

"That idea's been around a long time," I said. "There was a theory--"

"Then there was the matter of the views of Mars," the general said. "The aerial shots of the 'canals' were regarded as very cleverly done." He turned to Pruffy, who opened his briefcase and handed a couple of photos across.

"This is a scene taken from the film," Smale said. It was an 8 × 10 color shot, showing a row of mounds drifted with pinkish dust, against a blue-black horizon.

Smale placed another photo beside the first. "This one," he said, "was taken by automatic cameras in the successful Mars probe of last year."

I looked. The second shot was fuzzy, and the color was shifted badly toward the blue, but there was no mistaking the scene. The mounds were drifted a little deeper, and the angle was different, but they were the same mounds.

"In the meantime," Smale bored on relentlessly, "a number of novel products appeared on the market. Chemists and physicists alike were dumfounded at the theoretical base implied by the techniques involved. One of the products--a type of pigment--embodied a completely new concept in crystallography."

"Progress," I said. "Why, when I was a boy--"

"It was an extremely tortuous trail we followed," Smale said. "But we found that all these curious observations making up the 'Martians' file had only one factor in common--you, Mr. Legion."